Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One and Grief: The Great Yearning, “an exquisite book, wrenching to read, and at the same time full of profound truths.” Bertram is also the author of the suspense novels Unfinished, Madame ZeeZee’s Nightmare, Light Bringer, Daughter Am I, More Deaths Than One, and A Spark of Heavenly Fire.

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Through stories, we learn how to deal with our fears, especially if we are the ones writing the story. If you novelize your fear of being eaten alive by monsters from outer space, then the terrestrial ones eating you alive don’t seem so monstrous. If you watch a movie about aliens taking over your body, then the terrestrial one that’s taking over your mind might not seem quite so alien. You don’t think you are being eaten alive or that your mind is being taken over? Well, you are and it is — it’s called aging. Little by little, the you that you know is being supplanted by a creature you could never fathom being. Some people turn into querulous beings totally unrecognizable from the daring-dos of their youthful selves. Some turn into their mothers. Some . . . Well, I’ve scared myself enough.

According to author Lee Child, we don’t write what we know — we write what we fear. Perhaps this is true. My books are filled with fears — fear of being at the mercy of mindless governments and corrupt corporations, fear of deadly and unstoppable diseases, fear of the loss of self, fear that our memories lie. Since all of these fears can be lumped into one group — fear of powerlessness — I wonder if all fears came down to that same thing. Mine do, anyway.

I checked out a list of phobias to see what sort of things people are afraid of, and now I’m in danger of becoming a phobiaphobe. Or a phobiaphile. Although I am sympathetic to anyone caught in the horror of a phobia, I do enjoy the names. Names such as levophobia, kainophobia, lachanophobia, mageirocophobia, melophobia, nomatophobia, nyctohylophobia, paraskavedekatriaphobia. Great names for dreadful conditions.

Okay, I’ll let you off the hook so you don’t turn into a Sesquipedalophobe (someone who fears long words). Here’s what the above-mentioned words mean:

Levophobia — Fear of things to the left side of the body

Kainophobia — Fear of anything new

Lachanophobia — Fear of vegetables

Mageirocophobia — Fear of cooking

Melophobia — Fear of music

Nomatophobia — Fear of names

Nyctohylophobia — Fear of dark wooded areas

Paraskavedekatriaphobia — Fear of Friday the 13th

The one fear I hope no one ever gets is patbertramophobia. So not good for me as a writer!

In a couple of previous bloggeries, I spoke of finding ideas, and how many thousands of ideas need to be accumulated to create a story. Ideas for characters — both believable and unbelievable — can come from real life. And not necessarily your own life.

In the 1973 book Cecil B. DeMille by Charles Higham, Higham talks about DeMille’s problems with Victor Mature while filming Samson and Delilah. DeMille, who chose Victor Mature to be Samson because of his role in Kiss of Death, was horrified when he first saw Mature at a costume test. He was badly out of condition, with fatty, flabby muscles. DeMille sent him to a gym for weeks of severe training until he lost thirty pounds. But that’s not the interesting bit.

Once shooting began that fall, Mature turned out to be even more problematica. He was a victim of numerous phobias: fear of water, fear of lions, fear of swords, and practically everything else as well. His genial, charming personality was far too weak for DeMille’s severe and stoical taste. When Mature appeared in the battle of the jawbone in which a great wind swept through the studio, he took fright at a particularly violent, machine-made gust, and fled, hiding in terror in his dressing room. DeMille had him brought back like a naughty boy who had run away from school. He picked up his megaphone, and in a voice icy with disgust, shouted in full hearing of the immense cast and crew: “I have met a few men in my time. Soem have been afraid of heights, some have been afraid of water, some have been afraid of fire, some have been afraid of closed spaces. Some have even been afraid of open spaces — or themselves. But in all my thirty-five years of picture-making experience, Mr. Mature, I have not until now met a man who was 100 percent yellow.”

A few notes about John Wayne from the same book: John Wayne hated horses. He was a good chess player. He got straight “A”s toward the end of high school. The sand in the batch of cement outside Grauman’s Chinese Theater where John Wayne put his prints came from Iwo Jima. Also, John Wayne only had to read his lines one to memorize them. He was a voracious reader.

These are the kind of ideas I like, the ones that make us think of characters in a different light: the hero who is afraid of everything; the big, physical man who is a great reader.

Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One debunks many established beliefs about what grief is, explains how it affects those left behind, and shows how to adjust to a world that no longer contains the loved one. “It is exactly what folk need to read who are grieving.”(Leesa Heely Emotional/Mental Health Therapist & Educator ).

Other books by Pat Bertram

Available online wherever books and ebooks are sold.

Grief: The Great Yearning is not a how-to but a how-done, a compilation of letters, blog posts, and journal entries Pat Bertram wrote while struggling to survive her first year of grief. This is an exquisite book, wrenching to read, and at the same time full of profound truths.

While sorting through her deceased husband’s effects, Amanda is shocked to discover a gun and the photo of an unknown girl who resembles their daughter. After dedicating her life to David and his vocation as a pastor, the evidence that her devout husband kept secrets devastates Amanda. But Amanda has secrets of her own. . .

When Pat’s adult dance classmates discover she is a published author, the women suggest she write a mystery featuring the studio and its aging students. One sweet older lady laughingly volunteers to be the victim, and the others offer suggestions to jazz up the story. Pat starts writing, and then . . . the murders begin.

Thirty-seven years after being abandoned on the doorstep of a remote cabin in Colorado, Becka Johnson returns to try to discover her identity, but she only finds more questions. Who has been looking for her all those years? And why are those same people interested in fellow newcomer Philip Hansen?

When twenty-five-year-old Mary Stuart learns she inherited a farm from her recently murdered grandparents -- grandparents her father claimed had died before she was born -- she becomes obsessed with finding out who they were and why someone wanted them dead.

In quarantined Colorado, where hundreds of thousands of people are dying from an unstoppable, bio-engineered disease, investigative reporter Greg Pullman risks everything to discover the truth: Who unleashed the deadly organism? And why?

Bob Stark returns to Denver after 18 years in SE Asia to discover that the mother he buried before he left is dead again. At her new funeral, he sees . . . himself. Is his other self a hoaxer, or is something more sinister going on?